Just Another Celebrity Cremation

When word spread that John Travolta and Kelly Preston’s son, Jett Travolta, had died in the Bahamas, I immediately wondered how they’d handle his funeral arrangements. Would they bring his body back to Ocala, Florida (their current home) for a burial or would they opt for cremation with viewing?

I was mildly surprised to learn that they had him cremated in the Bahamas and brought his cremains home for a private memorial service.

I was saddened to learn that my friends and family didn’t see any problem with this.

My immediate reaction was “how will his friends and family members get closure without his body present?”

Truth is, most Americans are becoming quite comfortable with “no-body” funerals and even more comfortable with the idea that funeral homes just handle the disposition.

And once again, they see a high-profile case where the family (regardless of their wealth) choose to handle services at home or away from a traditional funeral establishment.

This seems to be an important topic, as I’ve covered it on the blog many, many times in the last 2.5 years, so why don’t we spend whole conferences dealing with this issue?

If you own or run a funeral home, how are you planning to deal with the increasing number of people who don’t choose you, but instead opt for direct cremation and private services?

Are you stubbornly sticking with “what you’ve always done” and resenting the choices today’s consumers make?

If we are ready to confront this shift in society, how do we tell consumers that there’s another way (traditional cremation, perhaps?) or that funeral homes are about more than just body disposal?

And if we can’t change the direction, where do we fit into this new reality?

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6 Responses to “Just Another Celebrity Cremation”

I’m just as perplexed about what to do. My religion does not promote cremation and even suggests a wooden casket over a metal one. A funeral director’s dream. I suppose the only thing we can do is start offering a nice line of urns.

It is fascinating to watch the way in which cremation is establishing itself in the US. Particularly interesting, to English eyes, is your direct cremation option which, over here, would be regarded as brutally and wholly unnecessarily cursory, not to mention disrespectful. Frankly, it is vile.

Where memorial services with only ashes present are concerned, I think most English people would regard a ceremony in which the dead person was present inside an urn as being faintly (as we would say) ridiculous. Translated from Brit understatement, that reads as embarrassingly absurd.

At the same time, we customarily cremate in the venue where we also hold the funeral ceremony, and this leads to the unsatisfactory situation where ceremonies are too short (because there are so many bodies to cremate). Over there in the US you do funerals much better, and much more fully, than we do.

I guess it all comes down to expense. In the UK funerals are not especially expensive, so there is no need for a direct cremation escape route from ‘greedy’ funeral directors.

A funeral isn’t a funeral unless there is a body present. That’s what people need – to spend some time in the same room as their dead person. That’s what gives them closure. And while I think that that’s incontrovertible, I would regard any claim that people need to actually see the dead body as debatable.

It’s not cremation that’s the big deal. It’s only a preference for fire over earth. You guys can accommodate that, surely?

If it means simpler, cheaper funerals, make the best of that. If it means that people are going to have funeral ceremonies (prior to cremation) with a body present, but in a closed casket (or even a cardboard one), make the best of it.

If folk are going to reject embalming, cosmetization and expensive caskets, so be it: your industry will shed skills, profits and personnel; it will evolve into something altogether less. It may not be able to maintain you at present levels of prosperity. There’s nothing you can do about that. Over here in the UK it is common for well-off and famous people now to go to their cremation in a cardboard box on which photos have been stuck and messages scrawled. Funeral directors, most of them, do not get rich.

Surely you have to make the most of the way things are? It is folly to defy the waves. Our King Canute tried to do that and he got his feet wet. If people no longer want what you do in the embalming room, work harder to give them what they want in the ceremony room (the ceremony is, after all, the climax of the process, not the unveiling of a good-looking body).

Service providers must work collaboratively with their clients if they want to thrive.

No one, when they eat out, prices the food on their plate according to how much they could buy it from at Walmart. They’d eat at home if price was what mattered most. No, they eat out, at not inconsiderable extra expense, because they want great cooking and great service.

Nobody begrudges paying good money for great service. And that’s where the profit lies.

Will you take me down the yellow brick road to find the funeral wizard? Will he have the answers? Can he find me a brain? Or will he be just another man behind the curtain who blew in on a storm and will be gone when the balloon slips it’s knot?

We all know there is no funeral wizard, but we keep hoping.

Tim, I’d love to have a meeting where all we did was talk about the reality that people want our services less and less. Name the time and place and I’ll be there. Then we can ask all the questions we need to and search for some answers together. All we need is a conference room at a hotel near an airport. But it can’t be sponsored by casket or urn folks who think the answer is just to sell more of their stuff, cause that’s not it.

The main problem is people are having a party and they don’t want us anywhere near it. We’re the “dead guys” who have spooky buildings that were built and equipped to accommodate dead people in boxes. They don’t think we could possibly hold any type of real fun wing ding at our place. Cripe, they might spill stuff on our couches. And God knows we love our couches (every funeral home web site has pictures of couches with nobody sitting on them). Is it possible for us to change our image both personally and building wise???

This is a fascinating conversation. I am actually in the process of writing my Creative Nonfiction Graduate thesis (a.k.a. book) about the changing ways that Americans memorialize our dead, compared to the Victorians. It’s essays covering things like green burial, traditional burial, obits, all the strange things we do with ashes, etcetera.

I find your response, Charles, to be especially intriguing. I am curious about how things are done differently in the UK, and why. If the US tends to skew toward more elaborate funerals, then why? Something to do with religion? The fact that the UK didn’t experience the religious revivals of the 1960s the same way that US did? Something more?

I’m curious too, about the way other nations see memorialization in the States.

And about all this “viewing the body” stuff, I read recently that the UK is actually trending back toward realizing how meaningful that experience can be.

I’d love to hear back from you all. Curious to hear more of your observations.
Thanks.